Nintendo's SNES Classics Coming to New 3DS

Nintendo is bringing Virtual Console ports of Super Mario World, Earthbound and more to the New 3DS.

Nintendo's Virtual Console program is easily one of the best things about owning any modern Nintendo gaming system. That being said, it's not without flaws. The titles available from system to system frequently vary and it's not uncommon for games available on the WiiU to be completely unavailable on the 3DS and New 3DS. According to Nintendo's most recent Nintendo Direct however, the New 3DS is about to receive a huge 16-bit bump to the its selection.

According to the Nintendo Direct, the New 3DS will now begin offering a selection of SNES ports. As of yesterday, North American New 3DS owners can now purchase and play digital copies of Super Mario World, F-Zero and Pilot Wings. This selection will expand on March 24th with the Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario Kart and Earthbound. Finally, on April 14th New 3DS owners will gain access to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country 2. European New 3DS owners will be receiving all of those same titles before the end of March. The games will cost $7.99 each and come with a "perfect pixel" option to recreate their original resolution. There are no cross-buy options for gamers who already own them on the WiiU.

While I'm very much happy for New 3DS owners, as someone still using the 3DS XL I'm going to admit that I'm sad they aren't coming to the older models. Nintendo has affirmed in the past that there are technical issues that keep it from bringing SNES Virtual Console titles to the older 3DS's. Regardless, it's hard not to feel like it's a bit silly that a handheld that can run a remake of Majora's Mask would have a hard time with a ROM of A Link to the Past.

SNES, eh, that's cool and all but I'm wondering when in the hell they're going to finally put some GBA titles up on their shop for download. They gave away a bunch to Ambassadors, and while I was happy with most of them, there are definitely some I would totally just BUY if they put them up on the shop. If they're having trouble getting SNES games to work on the 3DS or whatever, why not just put up the stuff you know people will buy?

So buy a Wii or a Gamecube and play TTYD? I just don't understand this attitude that a game must be remade/re-released for people who "want to play it so badly" to buy it and play it. It's not like a used Gamecube or Wii is overly expensive and TTYD, while sort of expensive is not rare.

... Because I don't to buy another entire console just to play the one game? I alredy have enough wires running across my floor and hardware hooked up to my TV as it is. I wanted to play Super Metroid but never owned an SNES either and guess what? I was able to play that because I owned a Wii at one point. I apologise if I somehow baffled your mind by having the audacity to want to play an old video game on a current console.

With all due respect, it doesn't sound like you want to play it "so badly". When I want to play something "so badly", I find a way to make it happen. I remember years ago you could get a Gamecube from Gamestop for $30, that included one controller. When they are in stock, they are now only $20 (link below). I used to have alot of old consoles, you know what I did about the wire problem? I put the consoles that wouldn't fit neatly into a closet. It's too bad you didn't play TTYD when you had a Wii. It is a great game.

Unfortunately I do not have Gamestop anywhere near where I live. Only GAME. The only second hand game stores near me are CEX and none of them have Gamecubes or Wiis or even a copy of TTYD. I'm a bit iffy on buying used consoles online but that's just a personal thing that I have.

OuendanCyrus:I want to be able to play GC games on the Wii U or something, I never owned a GC and want to play TTYD so badly.

So buy a Wii or a Gamecube and play TTYD? I just don't understand this attitude that a game must be remade/re-released for people who "want to play it so badly" to buy it and play it. It's not like a used Gamecube or Wii is overly expensive and TTYD, while sort of expensive is not rare.

... Because I don't to buy another entire console just to play the one game? I alredy have enough wires running across my floor and hardware hooked up to my TV as it is. I wanted to play Super Metroid but never owned an SNES either and guess what? I was able to play that because I owned a Wii at one point. I apologise if I somehow baffled your mind by having the audacity to want to play an old video game on a current console.

With all due respect, it doesn't sound like you want to play it "so badly". When I want to play something "so badly", I find a way to make it happen. I remember years ago you could get a Gamecube from Gamestop for $30, that included one controller. When they are in stock, they are now only $20 (link below). I used to have alot of old consoles, you know what I did about the wire problem? I put the consoles that wouldn't fit neatly into a closet. It's too bad you didn't play TTYD when you had a Wii. It is a great game.

OuendanCyrus:I want to be able to play GC games on the Wii U or something, I never owned a GC and want to play TTYD so badly.

So buy a Wii or a Gamecube and play TTYD? I just don't understand this attitude that a game must be remade/re-released for people who "want to play it so badly" to buy it and play it. It's not like a used Gamecube or Wii is overly expensive and TTYD, while sort of expensive is not rare.

... Because I don't to buy another entire console just to play the one game? I alredy have enough wires running across my floor and hardware hooked up to my TV as it is. I wanted to play Super Metroid but never owned an SNES either and guess what? I was able to play that because I owned a Wii at one point. I apologise if I somehow baffled your mind by having the audacity to want to play an old video game on a current console.

ShadowHand25:What pisses me off is the original launch day 3DS is perfectly capable of playing downloaded GBA games just fine, and the GameBoy Advance was far better technically than the SNES. So either Nintendo is full of it, and wants people buying the New 3DS for these arbitrarily exclusive features, or there is something a 90's home console is capable of that a 2000's handheld console that's superior in almost every way isn't.

Perfectly capable as long as they pretty much shut down the OS completely. I wouldn't say that's perfect, but I am not a dictionary. The question now is, do you dare to admit that you're wrong?

OuendanCyrus:I want to be able to play GC games on the Wii U or something, I never owned a GC and want to play TTYD so badly.

So buy a Wii or a Gamecube and play TTYD? I just don't understand this attitude that a game must be remade/re-released for people who "want to play it so badly" to buy it and play it. It's not like a used Gamecube or Wii is overly expensive and TTYD, while sort of expensive is not rare.

ShadowHand25:What pisses me off is the original launch day 3DS is perfectly capable of playing downloaded GBA games just fine, and the GameBoy Advance was far better technically than the SNES. So either Nintendo is full of it, and wants people buying the New 3DS for these arbitrarily exclusive features, or there is something a 90's home console is capable of that a 2000's handheld console that's superior in almost every way isn't.

The SNES wasn't pulling all it's own weight, some of the carts had special chips in them to help boost the capabilities of the SNES. I think people have tried to run SNES emulators on the 3DS and it just doesn't work very well.

My problem here is that they want us to buy these damn games again. I bought the digital version of Super Mario World on the Wii and then the $2 upgrade fee on the Wii U and now they want me to pay $8 to play it on the 3DS.

Think of it in terms of drivers for Windows. A driver for Windows XP will not work for Windows 10. The technical coding language on how to access resources, determine AI, calculate damage, etc etc, have drastically changed over the years.

We're also talking about emulation, not remaking. I'm sure anyone could remake, and thus recode, the entire game for newer hardware, but then you leave the quirks out from the original limitations of the hardware. For example: the Mega Man games on NES had quirks where there were too many enemies on screen, how firing your main canon worked, etc. If Mega Man was recoded to remove these quirks then it would not be the same game. Do you then release the game as is, without the quirks gamers grew up to love and potentially alienating those gamers who grew up playing with them in, or do you now code in the limitations in for a more "authentic" experience? Coding in the limitations would probably take even longer than getting an emulation running.

In an emulation the framework behaves like it would running on the old hardware, thus keeping all the quirks, bugs, and issues thereof. It would be a more authentic experience just like in the old days.

Okay, so now you decide you want to emulate rather than remake. If we use the original analogy of Windows XP and Windows 10 Microsoft has used .NET Framework and DirectX over the years for games and apps. Games that used an older versions of these frameworks have had issues running on newer versions of the framework and even newer hardware. A 386 behaves differently than a i7 in how it accesses information. So now you're trying to emulate old hardware framework on new hardware, with different coding languages and access speed. It's easier when the new consoles was built with these older frameworks, and in some cases older hardware, built right into the new console itself. It can take advantage of running precisely how the old console worked.

So, to SNES and 3DS. There's some emulation built into the console with the Virtual Console project. The 3DS is a powerful piece of hardware, able to run 3D images without glasses and all that, but it's still limited on how things were built into it. It's not just about emulating the game 1:1, but also getting it to run on the 3DS framework without crashing. The 3DS runs it's "Operating System" in the background along with the game. Factors have to be taken into account of how SNES games would react when suspended into the 3DS OS. Let's say you suspend the game halfway through the game accessing a sprite. When you resume the game is the framework going to continue loading the sprite correctly, or will Bowser be missing an arm or a leg? Will Mother Brain just be a floating jar? Will sound play correctly or buzz and hiss when it comes to a corrupted piece of music or soundbyte?

tl;dr: It's about a 1:1 experience without new bugs from newer hardware. It's easier to remake than emulate, but that kills the experience from the old hardware.

ShadowHand25:What pisses me off is the original launch day 3DS is perfectly capable of playing downloaded GBA games just fine, and the GameBoy Advance was far better technically than the SNES. So either Nintendo is full of it, and wants people buying the New 3DS for these arbitrarily exclusive features, or there is something a 90's home console is capable of that a 2000's handheld console that's superior in almost every way isn't.

Or the 3DS literally has complete GBA hardware built-in for DS backwards compatibility purposes (you'll note that it doesn't support many 3DS features in ambassador games such as sleep and home menu), but does not have SNES hardware and would have to resort to emulation, which is much more demanding than running a game natively.

What pisses me off is the original launch day 3DS is perfectly capable of playing downloaded GBA games just fine, and the GameBoy Advance was far better technically than the SNES. So either Nintendo is full of it, and wants people buying the New 3DS for these arbitrarily exclusive features, or there is something a 90's home console is capable of that a 2000's handheld console that's superior in almost every way isn't.

I've got some of these on my Wii U so I don't know if I'm willing to re-buy games like Link to the Past and Super Mario World for the third or fourth time and Super Metroid for the...second I think. This is fantastic that they're finally being offered up but it would be great if say, people who own these games on their home console were to get a discount. Perhaps a membership to some type of reward service would fix that issue.

Man, if that included Super Mario RPG, I might have to break down and actually buy a New 3DS despite my hatred of all things 3D. So many classic SNES games that I never played due to not owning a SNES as a child (I had a Genesis).

Ugh, no cross buy. This could, could, have been the tipping point for me to buy a New 3DS if Nintendo had played "catch up" with such an easy and obvious thing. As much as I'd love Super Metroid and A Link to the Past on the go (without being naughty), I'd rather not drop $200 for the privilege of buying those games a third or fourth time.